When a wireless communication terminal such as a mobile phone is performing communication, if the terminal moves to an area where radio waves of the currently serving base station may not reach, the communication may be disconnected. Accordingly, the wireless communication terminal switches, in the course of movement, the currently serving base station to a communication destination station to continue the communication. Switching of base stations, to which the wireless communication terminal is connected, in this manner is called a “handover”.
In order to carry out this handover, the wireless communication terminal measures qualities of radio-waves coming from adjacent base stations located in a neighboring area to the currently serving base station, and selects a target base station to be connected (in the following, the measurement operation of radio-wave qualities is also called a “scan”).
As a result of the scan, the wireless communication terminal determines a base station providing the highest radio-wave quality among the adjacent base stations, and performs a handover with the determined target base station.
As a related-art technique, a proposal has been made that if there is an unsuitable base station among a plurality of base stations that are connection candidates, a selection priority of that base station is decreased. Also, a technique has been proposed in which when a frequency band available for using a communication service is searched, a frequency not to be a carrier frequency is skipped in order to be excluded from the search targets.
The related-art techniques have been disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication Nos. 2010-28665 and 2007-116561.